Chapter 17

A MUSICAL FROLIC

THOUSANDS of people revel in the delicious and melodious comicalities of ‘Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, but did either Gilbert or Sullivan imagine for a moment, when they first began to collaborate, that their work would so completely take the world by storm? Their success must have put to shame their most sanguine dreams. The operas became immensely popular when they were first produced and they are just as popular—perhaps more popular—today. Indeed, as a recent critic observed, they have become a touch-stone by which we instinctively judge other light musical pieces. In our view of all this, it is interesting to review the circumstances under which Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan first put their heads together. Mr. G. K. Chesterton declared that the most notable discovery of the Victorian era was the discovery of nonsense. That stirring age was pre-eminently an age of daring ingenuity and masterly manufacture; but Mr. Chesterton thought that the finest of all its innumerable .productions was the making of good jokes. All that was real ly illustrious in the literature of that fruitful period emanated, he believed, from the awakening of an altogether delightful sense of exquisite humour. An entirely fresh vein was exploited, and the Englishman of those days excelled himself, in Mr. Chesterton’s judgment, as a humorist, and one of the best humorists in Europe. ‘This,’ he declared, ‘is the last essential of the Victorian. Laugh at him as a limited man, a novelist, a conventionalist, an opportunist, a formalist—what you will; but remember also that he is really a humorist, and may still be laughing at you!’ Mr. Chesterton did not mean, of course, that humour only came into the world half a century ago, but that the Victorians gave us a humour of an entirely new kind. Humour was already a thing of antiquity when Diogenes was born; but for all that, it is obvious that the age that presented to the world the inimitable drolleries of Dickens, the delightful adventures of Alice in Wonderland, the delicious merriment of Sir W. S. Gilbert, and the brilliant wit of Punch, had about it a certain facility for fun that none of its predecessors could pretend for one moment to rival. A sly twinkle haunted the eye of the typical Victorian, and a hearty peal of laughter was never far away.

Gilbert and Sullivan recognized from the start the humorist is beset by two opposite temptations, the temptation to buffoonery and the temptation to cynicism; and it is to their lasting honour that they contrived to steer skilfully between the rocks of Scylla on the one hand and the whirl pool of Charybdis on the other. ‘Sullivan and I,’ Gilbert tells us, ‘set out with the determination to prove that these elements were not essential to the success of comic opera. We resolved that our plots, however ridiculous, should be coherent, that our dialogue should be void of offence; that, on artistic principles, no man should play a woman’s part and no woman a man’s. Finally, we agreed that no lady of the company should be required to wear a dress that she could not wear with absolute propriety at a private fancy ball. I believe I may say that we proved our case.’ The pre-Victorian critics were fond of extolling Addison as the beau-ideal whose fountain of humour should be regarded as the model of the younger writers; and, in all the circumstances, it is difficult to quarrel with their choice. The merriment of Addison was certainly innocent of the ugly blemishes that disfigured the jests of Voltaire and the satires of Swift; but, on the other hand, it cuts a sorry figure when compared with those spacious realms of magnificent nonsense which the litterateurs of a century later so bravely discovered and so thoroughly explored. The flickering of mirth of the Georgian authors seems scarcely more worthy of comparison with the rich creations of the Victorian schools than does the humour that Heinrich Heine saluted in his kittens or that Darwin admired in his dogs. There is nothing in the older literature that can hold its own against the glorious gusto of Mr. Pickwick, the excruciating absurdities of the March Hare, or the polished subtleties which for so many years have made famous Mr. Punch’s Wednesday dinner-table at Bouverie St. And certainly the playwrights of a century ago were incapable of giving us anything that could compare with the rollicking drolleries of Pooh-Bah, the consequential pomposities of the Duke of Plaza-Toro and all the splendidly ridiculous creations of the Gilbert and Sullivan farce.

It is a serious mistake to suppose that nonsense exists merely for entertainment, recreation, and amusement. The humorist is often the most effective reformer. He does not scold or lecture or preach; he simply exposes the silly side of the thing that he wishes to alter. Gilbert had a natural facility for seeing the absurdities of life. He finds himself for example, at a fashionable wedding; it seems to him that the pomp and circumstance of the affair is badly overdone. It should, he thinks, be greatly simplified. But he does not storm or grow furious about it. ‘1 can’t understand,’ he writes, ‘why so much fuss is made over a partnership, or rather I don’t understand why the process should not be applied to all partnerships. It seems to me that the union (say) of Marshall and Snelgrove might, and should, have been celebrated in the same fashion. Marshall waiting at the altar for Snelgrove to arrive (dressed in Summer stock remnants); a choir to walk in front of Snelgrove chanting; a Bishop and a Dean (and also a solicitor) to ratify the deed of partnership; and a bevy of coryphee fitters-on to strew flowers in their path. It is a pretty idea, and invests a contract with a solemnity not to be found in a solicitor’s or conveyancer’s chambers’   Again, it was the fashion half a century ago, to discuss at great length, and with a ponderous show of erudition, the question of the sanity of Hamlet. Gilbert did not assail the learned controversialists; he simply took a hand in the debate himself. ‘Opinion concerning Hamlet,’ he wrote, ‘is divided.’

Some men hold

That he’s the sanest far of all sane men-

Some that he’s really sane, but shamming mad —

Some that he’s really mad, but shamming sane —

Some that he will be mad, some that he was —

Some that he couldn’t be. But, on the whole

(As far as I can make out what they mean),

The favourite theory’s somewhat like this;

Hamlet is idiotically sane

With lucid intervals of lunacy.

This is excellent fooling in more than one way. Anything that develops and expands the sense of humour in a people increases the general intelligence of that people, adds to the sum total of its happiness and enriches its national life. An important and delicate situation may often be saved if the parties affected have an eye for the funny side of things. Who can review the strifes and squabbles of centuries gone by, without deploring the utter lack of humour which so often characterized the angry combatants? ‘Isn’t it desperately comical,’ George Gissing makes one of his characters exclaim, ‘that one human being can hate and revile another because they think differently about the origin of the universe?’ A glance at the controversies of our own time, and then at those of a century or two ago, will reveal the pleasing extent to which the discovery of nonsense has moderated the acerbities of forensic and philosophical strife. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the humorists have done us good, and every man whose appreciation of the ludicrous has enabled him to enjoy the irresistible conceptions of Gilbert and Sullivan will grate-fully acknowledge that the new and rich vein exploited by those skilful fun-makers has proved in every way worthy of the distinguished genius which they applied to their superb adventure.

Dr. F. W. Boreham​